Remember how Oracle got ticked off that Red Hat wound up buying JBoss?

And remember how Oracle poached Red Hat's operating system to sell as Oracle's own?

Well, what goes around comes around.

Red Hat is now setting out to attack Oracle through its pending takeover of BEA.

Seems Red Hat has this open source project called BlackTie that it's organizing so it can migrate and replace legacy BEA Tuxedo transaction processor installations.

Red Hat says it'll be Tuxedo-compatible, support Tuxedo APIs, run high-speed Tuxedo applications and before you know it turn into a commercial Red Hat product.

Red Hat, which called it a "significant announcement," figures to have the project kicked off in 30 days and a commercial product out by the end of the year.

It was unclear through the garble of Red Hat's webcast Thursday how large of piece of the market it's hoping to uproot - even the second time through the question - but the words "pretty significant" could clearly be heard.

Red Hat has two other multi-part open source projects that it intends to use to expand the JBoss Enterprise Middleware portfolio and push it into corporate world, the whole purpose of the exercise: one on SOA governance and other on enhanced systems management.

The first of the governance projects, based on an open source contribution derived from Red Hat's 10-month-old MetaMatrix acquisition is called JBoss.org DNA and is supposed to result in a full-featured repository to serve as a SOA governance foundation technology. Other sub-projects are supposed to be announced in the next couple of months.

The other is based on a management platform that Red Hat and Hyperic put together dubbed RHQ that will serve as the code base for JBoss Operations Network 2.0, due out this spring with improved configuration and manageability skills and aimed at larger environments. The collection system, for instance, is supposed to be optimized for performance and storage, wringing more metrics out of it.

The open source RHQ project is supposed to create a common services management platform to be used in future Hyperic and Red Hat products.

Now for it's part BlackTie is supposed to take the current JBoss transaction monitor project, JBoss.org Transactions, and add C, C++ and mainframe-compatible transaction capabilities to it. It should be able to provide the kind of, say, security, naming and clustering services legacy systems currently offer.

Red Hat said it'll be a migratory slip-in, designed to fully support the ATMI programming interface so there'll be no need to replace the customer's client, server or service code.

And while Red Hat was ladling out futures it also promised to release JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform in the next week or so, also aimed at getting the enterprise set to accept open source.

It promises to be simpler and more cost-effective than monolithic proprietary stuff and eliminate the error-prone pain points where things are done by hand.

It's built from JBoss ESB (application & service integration), jBPM (orchestration) and Rules (policy) combined with Red Hat Linux and is touted as being as good for small integration projects as enterprise-wide SOA integration.

Besides its customizable base, Red Hat said it includes scalable clustering, JEE technologies and event-driven architecture widgetry.